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Neo-liberalisation of universities is advancing through a bureaucratic revolution. 'Marketising bureaucracy' advances neo-liberalisation through audit and rankings in the name of ensuring value for money and consumer choice. However, bureaucracy in universities is not total, just as neo-liberalisation is a project which advances on an uneven terrain of values. This article argues that to exercise academic autonomy, to continue to value education, we must learn to distinguish between 'marketising' and 'socialising' bureaucracy. Socialising bureaucracy encodes the ethos of impartiality in practices that support academic judgement – both against marketisation and against abuses of collegiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between social movements, human rights and law at different scales. I compare ‘global constitutionalism’ and ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ as approaches to movements, rights and law. As sociologists, we are especially well placed to address certain assumptions on which these inter-disciplinary approaches rely. I argue that assumptions about the relationship between social movements and human rights that are fundamentally normative limit our understanding of the diversity of organisational forms through which human rights are being defined, and of the complexity of multi-scalar law through which claims to justice are being made. In particular, the importance of the state and national law for institutionalising human rights norms should not be neglected by privileging either local or international law as the legitimate focus of democratic claims for justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1970s, a wave of young Western hippies descended on the beaches of Goa in India. Forty years later, some of them reconnected on the social network site Facebook and planned a reunion. This event, and the Goan hippy community then and now, are the subjects of a documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe, produced by Australian documentary maker Darius Devas. Funded by Screen Australia, SBS and Screen New South Wales, Goa Hippy Tribe is the first Australian documentary to be produced for the social network site Facebook. In this article, I consider how documentary in a social network context might be theorised. While the concept of the database narrative is most often invoked to explain user interactivity in online documentary, social networks such as Facebook invite different forms of interaction, and therefore raise distinct theoretical questions. In particular, Goa Hippy Tribe demonstrates the potential for the audience to engage creatively and communally with documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, 'actually existing' cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens. Far from inaugurating a new era of genuinely universal human rights, in some cases cosmopolitan law may even contribute to the creation of conditions in which fundamental human rights are violated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with post-Marxism and materialism in the work of Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As 'postMarxists' these writers use 'material' in a variety of ways, all of which indicate limits and constraints. The article focuses on one version of 'materialism' in this work, a version that is more implied than elaborated, in which 'material' is equivalent to institutionalized performativity or sedimented discourse: to 'objective' social structures and institutions. Post-Marxists often use 'the social' as equivalent to 'material' in this sense, to gesture towards the context in which politics succeeds or fails. I argue that the specificities of 'the social' cannot be theorized from within the terms of post-Marxism itself and that Butler and Laclau acknowledge this limitation in their most recent work. I therefore conclude that post-Marxism needs a supplement that I call political sociology. This is a dangerous supplement in the Derridean sense: a necessary addition that destabilizes the value post-Marxism gives to the distinction between 'social' and 'political' in which the latter is the privileged term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a diversity of views among feminists who have been debating whether or not a women's movement exists in Britain today. In part this is due to the lack of a clear working definition of social movement. This article uses social movement theory to discuss the ambiguous signs that are taken to indicate either the movement's continuing existence or its disappearance: the growth of mainstream political organizations; a focus on 'women' in cultural production; the 'micro-politics' of everyday life (often enacted in the terms of 'I'm not a feminist but...'). The article looks at the history of second-wave feminism in England using the two main schools of social movement theory: the 'contentious politics' model focusing on organizations and formal political structures; and the 'submerged networks' theory that takes solidarity, conflict and challenging dominant cultural codes to be central to social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a well-documented 'cultural turn' in social theory. This takes two forms: the 'epistemological' case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the 'historical' case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the 'cultural turn' away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a 'cultural turn' in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics -- albeit without naming it as such -- and how this might be extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the role of deconstruction in feminism. Advantages; Detriments; Importance of representing knowledge as rhetoric; Importance of experience; Classification of the perspectives of various critics.